Poetry, I totally flunked

Yeah, can't poem** my way out of a paperbag. But, for those of us who are poetically challenged, like yours truly,there is always the magic of poetry generators, for those times when you need a poem, like when you're wooing someone. I'm not sure if people woo at all these days, but maybe they should. Those who woo swear by poetry. And Hungarian gypsies. However, some of us [1] can't write poetry at all and [2] rarely carry a band of Hungarian gypsies around to play melancholy and yet ever-so-romantic music, and therefore, a poetry generator is a godsend.

I decided that as a public service, I would test some poetry generators and report on them, because Consumer Reports seldom tackles these things. I first tried this one, which is more along the lines of a poetry inspirator. You click "Create" and you get a line, for example:

In the chimney of antiquity the ferns shatter

or

In the halter of surrender the princes rock

I totally disregarded the admonition against repeatedly pressing "Create" and came up with a lot of "in the --- of ----- the ------" variations, all pretty nonsensical to me, but then I'm no poet.

Moving on to another generator. This one creates entire poems, which is good because unlike with the previous one, you don't have to think at all. Here's my magnum opus:

You dialed 5483. Delay
not, to
reach your brakes are supposed, by some,
cigarettes. You
find a light bulb. Chess
tonight
and stone of the counter,whispers,
and might stand for eighty years and might
stand for eighty years
and katydids are going
to reach your objective,
but only because your leisure.

I think it's pretty damn good -- weird and obscure, kinda like a Yoko Ono performance but without the shrieking, which I might add later as I develop my work.

But what if you're a Goth who can't write dark poetry no matter how many times you read whatever goths read to get into a dark, sorrowful, brutally suicidal and yet quite stylish, mood? How do you tell the world of your deep, shadowy and slightly blood tinted pain? You don't have to. Let the Goth-o-Matic poem generator express what your troubled soul can't. Let your inner Vampyr out, bare your fangs at the cruel world, and have something to read at the next gathering of the Undead. Check out my contribution to the ever deepening chasm of loneliness, despair, and angst that opens like a razor-toothed maw under the feet of the damned:

untitled

what have you wrought?
a miasma of betrayal as perceptions seep.
once we drank of innocence,glad-hearted and hand in hand,
but your thirst soured.
a vengeful morass of bitterness-
thoughts follow darkness, follow death,
love burnt to ashes.
in a torrent of righteousness,
i condemn you.

Man, that's so moving I need to have a goblet of absinthe right now.


**Vanessa verbified this noun, so if you are an agent of the Language Purity Bureau, go talk to her. I personally think it's cool. Yes, I'm aiding and abetting. 'Sides, she's a real poet, so she has a license, so take thee to the wretched place.